The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

Somebody is a lot more generous than I am with their definition of a standout blog, because apparently AEHElm has been nominated for the Bloggies 2024 'new blog of the year' list. THANK YOU!! to whoever got enough out of it in its brief run since late August to do that. I was going to make this post anyway, but now it feels doubly necessary to push through a patch of illness and get it out.[1] It's a brief explanation of the things I've written so far which are, IMO, worth reading*, and the things that I'm planning on doing next.  *My new years' resolution for this blog is to edit everything at least once before reading it, because some of my output thus far has been a triumph of 'getting something out before the end of a month' over quality.  If you're somehow learning about the bloggies from this post and not the other way around, I earnestly plead with you to show no loyalty. Go in there, read all the amazing things new bloggers have written this...

 I started imagining a dungeon based on the connecting branches of our christmas tree, which is a story I won't go into now. It got quite big, which made me wonder when it starts to qualify as a megadungeon? I know various people have expressed various opinions online and in some of the game's earlier editions, but this is the method that makes most sense to me for defining a megadungeon. Note, this doesn't factor in features that make a good megadungeon, things like multiple factions, entrances and exits, etc. A megadungeon is one with enough encounters to take you at least  from the game's starting level to the level at which your characters have a scope of power and concern beyond dungeon-crawling. Ideally, this can be reverse-engineered to a number of rooms to have that many encounters. (N.B. this standard probably means that games which don't provide a clear method for making dungeons, don't provide any way to level up/gain game-changing power through dunge...

 It's been a slow month, because A) I've started a new job and B) I've been working a lot on worldbuilding for my actual, y'know, games. I wonder how much there's a relationship between running simpler or less GM-centric games and maintaining a blog? That'd be interesting in terms of what it implies about the TTRPG blogosphere - it's certainly notable that indie games (often low/no/distributed GM, procedurally-driven) and OSR (procedurally-driven, often well-worn core conceits) dominate the space.[1] Both also tend to have light or modular worldbuilding, so that anything new you write for your home game can be put up online as well. The amount of explaining I'd need to do to get one of my settings across in order to share stuff I made for it puts me off a bit - not because they're exceptionally weird or unique, just because the value I get from them is in the depth and complexity of interrelated elements and they therefore have years upon years of ne...

 'The state of man dois change and vary, Now sound, now seik, now blyth, now sary, Now dansand merry, now like to die;      Timor Mortis conturbat me. '          - William Dunbar, 'Lament for the Makars' (c.1450) *** Yesterday morning, I walked to the shops. I listened to a short fifteen-minute podcast, released on Wednesday, written by Terry Robinson of Mage: the Podcast and performed by an actor, since he was - he said - recovering from a short illness. Yesterday morning, Terry Robinson died. I didn't know the man in the least, had never even exchanged a message despite lurking on the M:tP discord for years at this point. As such, I'm going to try to thread a needle here: His works meant a great deal to me, and I don't have any angle to approach a eulogy except from the perspective of what those works meant to me. However, I don't want to get too parasocial with it, or to do what Dunbar did and turn the deaths of those I respect into ...

Disclaimer: I wouldn't normally review a game I haven't played, but in this case Christopher Peter, the designer of Shadow Ops , reached out and asked me if I'd be interested. I could hardly refuse a free PDF of the game, so I agreed to do the review. I'd like to think I've been as honest as possible and acknowledged where my perspective is limited, but grain of salt etc. Prologomenon There are, as far as I can see, two main types of person who read a TTRPG review. THE USER: You want to see if you should get a copy of the book. Main (overlapping) subtypes: THE PLAYER: You're interested in running the game, or persuading somebody else to. Probably interested in how well the mechanics will allow you to do things that you want. THE READER: You're interested in reading through the book and going 'huh, cool!' then putting it on your shelf to gather dust. You may think you're 1.1 but 'never get around to it.' THE DESIGN NERD: You want to know h...